Edward Edwards: Portrait of a Librarian by W. A. MunfordReview by: W. L. WilliamsonThe Library Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Jul., 1964), pp. 270-272Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4305478 .

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270 THE LIBRARY QUARTERLY

no doubt many another set of initials, worry about the cost of cataloging the same book many times over in many different libraries, Mr. Ranz reminds us how over a hundred years ago Jewett remarked that of the 450,000 entries contained in the Smithsonian's collec- tion of public library catalogs, not more than 150,000 were for different titles (p. 47). From Jewett to Cataloging in Source is a long and dreary road.

We have returned to the book catalog in a number of libraries. And yet, even with modern technology, we have the problems of cost, of keeping up with the growth of the collections, of adequate service to the user, which plagued the nineteenth-century librar- ians. In 1875, of the hundred libraries in this country with collections over 20,000 volumes, only two-fifths had printed book catalogs with- in the previous twenty-five years (p. 42). Even with the loudly heralded printed cata- log of today, we have no adequate study of the comparative cost of cards and book, no adequate study of what the printed catalog really means to the user of the library.

Lo these many years we have had a Catalog Code Revision Committee hard at work on rules for author and title entry. It all began with Panizzi and Poole and Jewett and Cutter-and before: in 1826 the Committee of the Charles- ton Library Society drew up a statement of the "objects for which catalogues of books are consulted" with a distinctly modern ring (pp. 25-26). And "by the middle of the nineteenth century corporate authorship existed in fact, if not in theory" (p. 32).

This was the period which finally rejected the classed catalog and the alphabetico-classed catalog. It was the period when Cutter de- veloped his concept of "specific" entry and the dictionary catalog. We should be false to our profession if we had not long since be- gun to question both; we should be equally false if we were not concerned with how they came to be in the first place. When Ezra Ab- bot suggested that the subject entry should be determined by the book's content, not "merely by the accidental phraseology of the title" he may have been talking to us (p. 70).

For the library cataloger (as also, alas, for the library administrator) the job may now and then seem to exist in and for its tech- niques alone. Yet the library and all the jobs it tries to do-even cataloging-grow out of

social and economic needs and pressures. These also show up in this book's story.

The history of cataloging has been rather strangely neglected; there have been only two major studies. That of Dorothy Norris is annalistic and dull and goes only to 1950; moreover, in spite of its general title, it is concerned largely with England. Ruth French Strout's excellent essay in Library Quarterly (XXVI [1956], 254-75) deals primarily with the development of cataloging rules for entry under author and title. Ranz adds a great deal to the story. His book is more than a history of the printed catalog in this country for two centuries; it is also a history of the develop- ment of cataloging philosophy during those centuries.

The bibliographical apparatus of the book is somewhat bulky and awkward. The notes are in a section at the end, each chapter with its own numbered sequence; and after the notes comes a rather elaborate selected bibli- ography. This means that if you have a refer- ence to (say) note 5, you have some trouble finding it because you must first find where the notes for that particular chapter begin. It also means that a work may be listed two or more times-with the usual supply of "ibid's" and "op. cit.'s."

But this is an excellent book, concise, clear, and interesting. True, Shakespeare did not write it, but then Shakespeare had a few de- fects as a historian.

PAUL S. DUNKIN

Rutgers University New Brunswick, New Jersey

Edward Edwards: Portrait of a Librarian. By W. A. MUNFORD. London: Library Associa- tion, 1963. Pp. 240. ?2 8s. (non-members); ?1 16s. (members). Written in classic, chronological fashion,

this biography of Britain's pioneer public li- brarian is a competent study that is likely to stand as the authoritative work on its subject. Edward Edwards was a paradoxical figure of British library history. Active in library af- fairs at an early age, he held a prominent place for more than twenty years and earned distinction as a father of the British public library. But then, even though his name was firmly fixed in library history, he himself

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REVIEWS 2 71

occupied only obscure positions during the last quarter-century of his lifetime.

In 1836, at the age of twenty-three, Ed- wards was prominent enough as a lay critic of the British Museum to be called to testify before a Select Committee of the House of Commons. Friendly correspondence with An- thony Panizzi, then Keeper of Printed Books and later Principal Librarian, led in 1839 to Edwards' appointment as a cataloger on the Museum staff. The good relations between the two men did not long survive Edwards' official subordination to Panizzi, but it was not until 1850 that Edwards was discharged.

While still at the Museum, Edwards be- came the principal ally of William Ewart, member of Parliament, in the hearings that preceded passage of Ewart's Act of 1850, the basic enabling law for public libraries in Great Britain. Edwards' position in this campaign, his writings on library matters, and the sup- port of many associates led to his appoint- ment, in Manchester, as the head of the first large municipal public library in Britain.

For the six years from 1852 to 1858 Ed- wards pioneered procedures and policies of public library administration. As did many other librarians of his time, he had difficulties with his library committee, and finally he was discharged. During those years he wrote the two-volume history, directory, and handbook, Memoirs of Libraries, by which his name is best remembered across the Atlantic.

The years after 1859 were mostly anti- climax as library history. Edwards held a number of minor library posts and wrote books and articles about libraries and other subjects. He never lost his interest in library matters and, at the time of his death in 1886, was busy with a revision of his Memoirs of Libraries.

Edwards received some recognition during his lifetime, but he was well on the way to be- ing forgotten when, in 1902, Thomas Green- wood, his first biographer, revived his name. Now, W. A. Munford, director general of the National Library for the Blind, has gone over the ground more thoroughly than Green- wood was able to do. It is not a task that will need a third doing.

Munford has made a specialty of British library history, and this is his third book on the subject. Penny Rate: Aspects of British Public Library History, 1850-1950, was pub-

lished in 1951. Work on William Ewart, M.P., published in 1960, led naturally to attention to Ewart's collaborator in passage of the 1850 library law. The work is well done. The reader is rewarded with a clear picture of Edwards and his career.

Munford's writing is good, his research is painstaking, and his report very full. He can turn a nice phrase and, in the broad descriptive passages, his prose flows easily. Perhaps be- cause the biography of Edwards was submitted for a University of London degree, its every detail is documented, and every detail that was unearthed-so it seems-is reported. The result is a book that is, at times, heavy going.

Munford went astray in a way that tempts every biographer. A life is led in chronological order, day by day, week by week, year by year. A biographer who gets too far away from chronology risks serious distortion and anachronism. Yet only by bringing some meas- ure of topical order into the account can a biographer hope to give his readers an under- standing of his subject's significance. A danger even more difficult to avoid is the temptation to report all the facts. A biographer must dig out many details. Once he has unearthed them, he is sorely tempted to report them, not simply as a matter of pride and self-congratu- lation, but as a matter of record. The purpose of a biography, however, is not the making of a record but rather the creation of a work that will permit the reader to understand a man and his importance. We want to know not everything about Edward Edwards but rather what he contributed to librarianship, how he did it, why he did at times so well and at times so badly, and what his life and career have to say to us now. One part of the biographer's task is to tell us all we need to know, as fully and as clearly as his sources and his skill permit; a more difficult part is to refrain from telling us more. Munford has told us too much, and he has told it year by year. We would understand better if he had told us less and if he had told it differently.

These are criticisms that apply to many biographies. Munford's work is, in fact, one of the best that have been written about a librarian. His documentation is meticulous, his research has been extensive and careful, his objectivity and candor are above reproach. He is to be congratulated on a book that is

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272 THE LIBRARY QUARTERLY

essential reading for anyone interested in li- brary history.

W. L. WILLIAMSON

Columbia University New York

Henry Stevens of Vermont: American Rare Book Dealer in London, 1845-1886. By WYMAN W. PARKER. Amsterdam: N. Israel, 1963. Pp. 348. $7.50.

The past year has brought three biographi- cal studies of important figures in the history of nineteenth century American librarianship: Edward Holley's Charles Evans, William Wil- liamson's W. F. Poole, and now Parker's Henry Stevens. The subjects of the first two are well known to every American librarian, whether he be a specialist in library history or not; but if the name of Henry Stevens means anything to most present-day librarians, it doubtless suggests the prestigious London firm of Henry Stevens, Son & Stiles. But the founder of this distinguished bookselling or- ganization was no native Londoner but a shrewd Yankee from the hill country of northern Vermont who, at an unusually early age, learned the fine art of borrowing from Peter to pay Paul and, at the same time, sav- ing a substantial cut for himself.

Henry Stevens came to the antiquarian book business through his father's bookishness, a skill in calligraphy, a knowledge of American history gained from intimate association with Jared Sparks, Peter Force, George Ticknor, George Bancroft, Francis Parkman, and many others, and his experiences as librarian of Yale's Brothers in Unity library. At the age of twenty-six he left for London with nothing more than forty farthings, some modest debts, and a determination to get on in the world; in London he remained for forty-one years. Perhaps not too much skill was required to be a successful antiquarian book dealer in the middle of the nineteenth century. The stately homes of England, and New England, were filled with bibliographic treasures; men of wealth were eager to buy them; and always in the offing there were the emerging research libraries, which served as a ready and de- pendable market for those volumes that the Maecenae did not want. In such an environ- ment, a sharp Yankee with a solid knowledge

of Americana could scarcely fail. Certainly Stevens was not slow in learning the technique of playing off John Carter Brown against James Lenox, and Antonio Panizzi against both, to his great profit. He bought English books for American collectors and American books for the British Museum; yet he was not isolated from the world of reality, for during the Civil War he was an arms agent for General John C. Fremont. There is a curious paradox in the belief that books inspire vir- tue, while traffic in them seems to encourage improbity. If reading maketh a full man, book-collecting turneth him toward greed. Stevens' patrons grumbled about his prices, but they always came back for more-they were fair game, and he knew where the hunt- ing was good.

Yet despite Stevens' idiosyncrasies-and he had many of them; despite the fact that he was an operator, sometimes in the most ex- treme sense; despite his desire to sit with the mighty; despite these characteristics (or perhaps because of them), many of the great American libraries of today are deeply in- debted to him for their excellence. To his en- terprise such great collections as those of John Carter Brown, James Lenox, Edward A. Crowninshield, and the Smithsonian owe much much of their riches. He sold the library of George Washington to the Boston Athenaeum and the papers of Benjamin Franklin to the Library of Congress. It was Stevens who iden- tified the historical importance to the history of printing in America of the Bay Psalm Book, a copy of which he procured from a Pickering sale for nineteen shillings and later sold to Lenox for eighty pounds, after replacing four missing leaves from an imperfect copy be- longing to George Livermore. Moreover, he took an active interest in the first librarians' conference (held in New York in 1853) and in the early meetlngs of the American Library Association, and he worked intimately with many of the leaders in both of these under- takings. In England, he was a participant in the formation of the British Library Asso- ciation.

As one might expect of such a strong per- sonality, personal reactions to him were var- ied. Certainly he was the friend and confidant of many of the leading literary and historical scholars of his day. Herman Melville found him to be a congenial dinner companion and a knowledgeable guide through the British

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